


Long Roads, Tired Feet

by linaerys



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Sam POV, bucky pov
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-12
Updated: 2014-04-18
Packaged: 2018-01-19 03:28:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1453774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linaerys/pseuds/linaerys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He doesn’t remember his instructions for where to go, unless this house is it. He’s done that before, followed patterns with his body that he can’t remember in his mind. The body has memories that the electroshock can’t erase."</p><p>A Winter Soldier post-movie story. There will be some Steve/Sam, but this is ultimately Steve/Bucky. Plot, action, angst, learning to live again, learning to live now, and not in the past. This is a WIP, but I promise not to quit writing it before I get to the sex.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

In a safe house in Roslyn, the Winter Soldier, _Holodno Soldat_ , the _asset_ , strips off his armor. Snaps, leather, kevlar re-enforced, because the asset was valuable. That’s what assets are. 

Jacket, shirt, belt, pants off. He runs his fingers--his real fingers--over them, looking for anything that could cause him harm later. Shrapnel is usually the problem. His other hand doesn’t have the fine nerves to feel little things, like a twist of metal woven into cloth that will burrow into skin while fighting, perhaps slow reaction times. When he’s fighting, he only wants the pain he knows, intimately, and the pain he causes. 

He runs his metal hand over them next. This latest upgrade can send micropulses to disable any bugs, any fingernail sized spyder technology that has been planted on him. He’s clean.

He checks himself. He has wounds. A dislocated shoulder. Any number of cuts and abrasions. They will heal. 

He doesn’t remember his instructions for where to go, unless this house is it. He’s done that before, followed patterns with his body that he can’t remember in his mind. The body has memories that the electroshock can’t erase.

Maybe the metal has memories too. He feels it in the false nerves that connect to real ones, the way Captain America’s face felt under his fist. Like hitting a rock, at first, but then the damage began to show.

He feels the places that the Captain was pressed against him when he pulled him out of the water. Shoulder, hip, a forearm around his waist, until he could walk, and haul the Captain out by a strap on his shoulder. 

He trusts his body’s memories more than his mind’s. His mind--in those first years, he thought of it as a broken mirror. They never let him see mirrors. 

No, not a mirror. It reflects nothing back. It’s a maze where every turn is wrong. It’s a forest where will-o’-the-wisps beckon unwary travelers. The phrase doesn’t seem like his own; someone told it to him once upon a time. It’s a darkened street, with dangers in the alleys. He can’t follow the lights, the temptations.

“Your brain heals itself too quickly,” he remembers one of the technicians saying. That’s why he had to keep going back. He remembers when they had to force forgetting on him. He remembers when he welcomed it. Not oblivion, never that, but the walls it put up between this memory and that, the cracks, the chasms he couldn’t cross.

He pops his shoulder back into place. A moment of pain on the right to match the perpetual pain on the left. 

The facade of this safehouse is a brownstone perpetually under construction. No one will bother him here. From the outside it looks too dangerous for anyone to want to enter. On the inside, it’s serviceable enough. Especially for someone like him. A bed, a stove, a working sink and shower. Extensive first aid kit. He could, and has, dug bullets out of his own flesh in places like this, doing the work no matter how injured he is, before the days pass and fast healing means he has to cut healthy flesh.

He lies down on the bed. Someone will come for him, tell him he did well, put him back to sleep. The cold always starts where metal meets flesh. He lies back and traces that seam. He remembers that too, one of the memories they can’t touch, a memory written in the bone. First the elbow and down. And then a voice saying they had to go higher, the nerves weren’t strong enough there. Higher, and higher still.

If he--someone--the asset--hadn’t killed that surgeon, he might be all metal now, but the surgeon went far enough, into chest and healthy flesh, making those cold, cold connections where living nerve meets metal. The arm’s sensations are always sharp, the physical equivalent of a speaker’s feedback whine. Always too much, always too harsh. 

*

He avoids memories. Someone will come for him. Still, he avoids reaching out, sending up any of the usual signals, the way he’s been trained in emergencies. He doesn’t think about the mission that is past. His first failure. 

There was no need to kill Captain America, not after the floating ships fell out of the sky. 

He’s never made decisions like that before, at least not that he can remember. Or if he did, that was when they fractured his memories again, to make sure it would be a long time before he remembered how to think for himself again.

There is a mirror in the bathroom. He rarely looks in mirrors, and when he does, usually he has his mask, but he forces himself to look. This is the face of a man called Bucky. 

*

No one comes. He runs through the food. There is money. He goes out at night, wearing gloves on his hands, a hood pulled up, into too-bright bodegas, and brings back more cans. He can’t stand to be in the bright light so he pulls down whatever he can reach. One day all he got was corn. He made himself eat it all before he went back for anything else.

In time, memories reassemble themselves, as they always do. This was why at the end he asked for the treatments, the fist in the mirror. 

They come in the early mornings, sometimes, when he’s woken naturally. They are butterflies, they are moths, flitting things that he knows will disappear if he chases them. They are flashes of Captain America’s face, and he, the asset, is always following. That face is always beckoning, and always turning away. 

*

He keeps the local news on the safe house’s TV, turned low. He’s conditioned to react to certain words, even if they are barely audible, the words to tell him if someone is still looking for him. He learns that Pierce is dead. Hydra in ruins. Secrets splashed out over screens and lives.

Hydra is dead, he thinks. Hydra was supposed to be dead a long time ago.

He doesn’t know why that’s something he knows, something that should matter to him.

He knows that they call him the Winter Soldier, so he listens for that, though he's never been able to think of himself that way. Cold soldier, the Russian, that is better, for the cold that comes over him when they put him to sleep.

If he's free, he can lie in the sun, he thinks. He can be warm again. He's not a person who gets to be free, though. He knows that. The protectors of freedom can never be free. They must always be vigilant.

It doesn't feel like his thought.

He's not going back, though. No one has come for him. If he stays away, no one will. That is what the helicarriers crashing means. That is what Pierce's death means. There is no one to take away his memories, no one to put him away until he is needed again. No one to make it all stop. He has no name, and no purpose.

*

It takes a long time, maybe a week, before he feels ready to go. Puts on clothes, over armor; without armor he might as well be naked. More layers of clothes, a hood, a hat. He walks the streets at night in his naked face until he can stand the day, and then further afield, into a press of people. People who, he has to remind himself, are neither targets, nor between him and his targets. There must be a way to walk through a crowd without thinking of killing any of them. 

The museum is bright and full of people. Sun streams through high windows and warms him, though it doesn’t touch the cold underneath. He wants to attack whenever anyone brushes by him. So easy, his metal hand clenches in his pocket as though it’s around a throat.

He gets a ticket for the Captain America exhibit. The woman who takes the it is a small brunette with shadowed eyes. Her hands touch his for a moment and she smiles shyly at him. He just stares at her until she shakes her head and presses her lips together.

"Welcome home, soldier," she says.

He almost runs then. The only thing that stops him is remembering that the asset doesn’t fear people. The asset is a weapon, and weapons do not know fear. They do not know compassion. The asset only runs to protect himself. When he has eliminated his target, his job is done and his new job is to keep safe until he has a new target. That is the only time he may run. It's those words, the only memories, the only _knowledge_ he has that is absolute that keeps him still.

He feels her fingers on his, like the touch of Captain America's body in the water, long after the sensation should have faded.

There's a line to get into the Captain America exhibit, but he doesn't mind the wait. He watches, counts the exits, counts the guards, the guns. He could get out of here easily if he needed to. There are a thousand ways he could disappear.

Then there he is, Captain America, _Steve Rogers_ , little Steve, all grown up, take care of Steve, not that he had to be told, there's something underneath it all, _take care of Steve. Protect him._ Something he knows in the flesh.

“Do you still think he’s a good guy?” a ten-year-old boy asks his father. “I heard you say--”

“Yes,” the man cuts off his son. He has a worn-in face, a face aged by sun and wind, the stoop of an older man. He has seen war. 

“But he disobeyed orders,” says the boy. 

“Sometimes a soldier has to disobey his orders to serve a higher good,” says the father. “There are things I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

Then there he is, the face infrequently glimpsed in a mirror. The asset can't look for long, but here is the truth. Once his face was the same one worn by a young soldier named James Buchanan Barnes. He reads the words about Barnes’s life and death once, and then moves right back to the top again.

His eyes are wet when the needle goes into his neck, and it takes a few precious seconds before he remembers to fight. Then he falls into the darkness.


	2. Chapter 2

By the time they get to Kiev, Sam and Steve have been living in each other’s pockets for a few weeks. It should have been weird, going back to being that close with a guy. After all, one of the things he liked about being away from the military was having some privacy again. But he doesn’t miss it at all. He was almost grateful when Steve showed up again one night--”my apartment’s been compromised”--and didn’t leave after that.

Sam was too tired that night to find out what “compromised” meant, but the next day there was footage on all the news stations of commandos taking a man with a metal arm out of the air and space museum. Sam was extra glad Steve was there that night. 

None of their contacts could give them anything until Steve put Natasha on it. Then three days passed before they heard a word. Steve hardly slept more than an hour at a time during those three days--”I don’t need much sleep”--and neither did Sam, until Steve made him.

He woke up at midnight on the last night of Steve’s vigil. Steve was sitting in the dark of the living room, his head tipped back against the couch, too perfectly immobile to be sleeping. One earphone on his iPod was in, the other out--always on guard--and the tinny sound of Marvin Gaye came from the dangling end.

Steve pulled out the other earphone and sat up straight when Sam entered the room. “Sorry, did I wake you?” he asked. He looked as tired as Sam had ever seen.

“No.” He sat down next to Steve. Maybe good counselling posture would be across from him, leaning forward, listening stance. This seems good too, though, just voices in the dark. “Do you want to tell me about him? From before?”

“Do you want to know?” Steve asked. “He still might need--” a hard swallow “--to be stopped.”

“Maybe,” said Sam. “Maybe not.” That’s something Steve hadn’t talked about--whatever made him stay on that ship, to drop his shield into the Potomac. Far enough from where the Winter Soldier left him on the bank that they didn’t fall together. Tony Stark (and Sam’s still not over meeting him) was the one who fished it out for him, who mentioned where he found it, and left the implication hanging in the air. “He pulled you out, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” said Steve.

“So, tell me about him.”

“I don’t know,” said Steve. Sam knew this, the fear that saying anything would make the lost person less than. Just some guy. Just the most important person in my life who got lost the way you can lose your keys on the way to the store. 

Steve tipped his head back. “I don’t know where to start.” He sighed. “We grew up together. I was this little guy…” He looked down at his arms in the tight t-shirt he wore around the house, as if the curves of tanned muscle still didn’t really belong to him. “I was always getting in fights, and Bucky was always getting me out of them. He was strong, without trying. I could of--it would have been easy to resent him but Bucky wouldn’t let me. We were always in it together.”

He had other stories to tell, how Bucky had been there for him when his mother died, his father already long gone. Then the war.

“He was the first to cheer for me. I don’t know how long Zola had him there, what they did to him. I didn’t ask. People didn’t ask.”

Sam nodded. He’d dealt with some older vets who helped run the VA hospital. Some had told him they wished there’d been more programs like his when they were getting out of their own wars. More than a few had told him that if you couldn’t deal with your problems on your own, you goddamn didn’t deserve any other help either.

“I thought he’d tell me, if there was anything to tell. Or I’d just know. But then it was too late.” Steve yawned. “I’m tired, Sam. I’m going to sleep.”

Sam put his hand on Steve’s leg for--a comforting touch, or just to push himself up so he could get back to his own bed. He glanced at Steve then, and there was an odd moment between them before Steve looked away. 

“That’s another thing we didn’t talk about then,” said Steve. “But. Yes, it was that too.”

“No judgement here,” said Sam. “I wasn’t--”

“I know,” said Steve, with that gentle, amused-at-himself smile. “Thanks.”

Steve did sleep that night, for all Sam could tell. The next day Natasha came to visit them with news.

“Government organizations are even more annoying when they don’t know something than when they do,” she said, without even saying hello.

“You don’t have to tell me that,” said Sam, “I work for the VA.”

“Worked,” said Natasha. She seemed even more wary and off balance than she had when she first showed up at Sam’s door. She didn’t like being the center of attention, and now she was C-SPAN’s darling. CNN’s too. “I got some intel. You’re going overseas.”

The drive from the Kiev airport is through bucolic, sunlit, green country side, but it smells like garbage. “I read about this,” says Steve. He’s driving, irritatingly awake after a red eye flight from DC, a three hour layover in Munich. “It’s nothing sinister. The city’s dump is out here, and it’s not sealed like an American dump.”

“What haven’t you read?” Sam asks, and pushes up his sunglasses, too tired to want an answer.

“I wanted the history,” says Steve.

Kiev is a dilapidated collection of baroque confections, and vast Eastern Bloc plazas. They stay in a concrete bunker of a hotel, with a smoke-infused lobby, tiny elevators, and surly maids. The rooms are small and threadbare. He and Steve share one on the thirteenth floor. It has two narrow single beds. A bottom sheet but no top sheet, just a duvet that's too warm in this relentless heat.

Sam has to look at a map to remind himself that Kiev is further North than New York. It is hot and dry, like he imagines a Mediterranean country.

Natasha’s intel wasn’t much; hints of an assassin for sale. The hints didn’t even make it clear if the assassin was marketing himself, or being marketed by others. “It’s not Hydra, and it’s not SHIELD,” she said. “Or, it’s no one acting with those names.”

“There are going to be a dozen splinter groups on both sides,” said Steve.

“More,” said Natasha. “If you need my help…”

“We’ll call,” said Steve. “Again.”

Their first contact is Kiev is at the US embassy, in another bunker-style building, concrete, painted gun-metal gray. Embassy guards and black iron gates. It looks like a fortress, and makes Sam think of the helicarriers all over again. He can’t get tripped up, though, by what’s been done in his name, in his country’s name. That way lies more pain than he signed on for. 

"This is what it looks like," says Steve, as they pass through the gates. He wears street clothes that are a half casual nod to Captain America’s uniform, with the stripes across the shoulders, his shield on his back. “Fear over freedom.” Steve tenses when the doors close behind them. He hasn’t recovered from losing that trust, from becoming an enemy on his own soil. His shoulders hunch slightly forward. Protective posture, even though, only half recovered, the cuts on his face faded to pink lines, he could still probably beat up all the guards here without breaking a sweat.

Sam’s wings, new-made by Stark, are back in the hotel room, and here he's just a guy who will do anything to protect his friend. 

They meet with the deputy ambassador. It’s the guys a rung down who are usually in espionage, Natasha told them before she sent them off. This one has a long face, and big outdated glasses. He looks like he’s been in the office since the 70s. Maybe he has. Still, his eyes behind the smudged lenses are intelligent, round and owl-like. He knows more than he’s telling.

“I’ve been authorized by the US government to purchase Sergeant Barnes from whoever has him,” says Steve, in full-on Captain America, will-not-be-questioned voice.

“I heard the US government isn’t very pleased with you right now,” the deputy answers.

“They don’t want me on any intelligence missions,” Steve allows. “But I can do this. We will beat anyone’s price.”

“I don’t know why you’re telling me,” says the deputy. After that, they get the run-around Sam expected. No, no one has seen the Winter Soldier, and if they did, isn't this a matter for Interpol? The guy has killed a lot of people. 

When they get back to the hotel room, Steve seems as determined as ever. "That wasn't the real meeting," he says. "The real meeting will happen through back channels."

“That sounds like something Natasha taught you,” says Sam. 

“She did,” says Steve. “She’d be better at this.”

“Why didn’t you ask her to come, then?” Sam asked.

“It’s not her fight.” He looks at Sam where he stands by the window. “It’s not your fight either.”

Sam looks down. Their hotel room is high up. The late summer sun bakes the city gold. The wide, traffic-filled plaza is peaceful here, above the noise. Sam wishes he could go out sailing through that bright sky, riding the thermals over hot asphalt, swooping down over the broad river that cuts through Kiev’s heart. He used to do that with Riley, when they were in safe air-space, just stretch their wings and soar.

“I’m with you on this one,” says Sam, lightly. Anything he says along those lines will invoke memories of Bucky, and he doesn’t want to play on that.

They eat in the terrible hotel restaurant, over-cooked, over-priced steaks. The room backs up against a nightclub with dancers who take off their clothes, not really on the beat, without much of an audience. Steve gives a tactical look around, and then eats his food mechanically. When one of the dancers makes eye contact, beckons with a finger, Steve gives her a smile, and polite nod, and keeps his gaze firmly above her neck.

“You’re a boy scout,” says Sam, teasing.

“Nope,” says Steve. “Just a guy from Brooklyn.” At Sam’s skeptical look he adds, “I’m not celibate or anything. I just prefer…more willingness and less cash involved.” He’s making eye-contact with Sam, and then he blushes, smiles, and goes back to his food. 

Back in the room, Steve secures an internet connection and checks to see if Natasha has any new intel for them. Nothing new, but confirmation that whoever has the Winter Solider, government or not, took taken him to Ukraine. Near as Sam can figure it--well, he can’t figure it at all. Ukraine is out from under Russia's thumb, but still fighting with them. Maybe it was even US-born Ukranian sympathizers, galvanized by Russia’s invasion to taking steps. 

Or it might be nothing like that, it might just be a good place to get lost, a place with enough chaos that a legendary assassin can disappear.

When there’s no news, Steve reads a book on his Kindle, always and forever catching up with the history of the past seventy years. This one is about the fall of the Soviet Union.

"We'll find him," says Sam.

Steve smiles as if Sam's the one who needs reassurance. "I know we will."

The hotel phone rings in the middle of the night. The escorts they requested are here. Of course, they didn't order any escorts, but it's something strange. Perhaps the first step to getting a contact.

Steve looks strange in the street clothes Natasha helped him pick out for this mission, shiny pants and a loudly patterned shirt. “How do I look?” he asks when he catches Sam looking at him.

“Like an ugly couch,” says Sam with a grin. 

The women in the lobby--girls, really, neither of them older than seventeen--take Sam and Steve by a hand each, and bring them out to a waiting SUV. Steve’s aw-shucks demeanor is working for him here. He looks around, as if embarrassed to be seen with this half-dressed girl clinging to him.

Once inside the SUV, the girls melt back into the shadows, and their handler, a thick-set man with a short brush of iron gray hair, leans forward and says, “I hear you are looking for an assassin. Here, they are plentiful. What do you want?”

“We’re looking for one in particular. About six feet tall. Metal arm,” says Steve.

The man settles back. “You want ghost. What you want--impossible.”

“We’ve heard it’s not,” says Steve, seeming totally unrattled.

“The _Holodno Soldat_ is not an easy man to find,” the man replies.

“But you can do it?” says Steve.

“I may know some people.” He folds his hands over his stomach. “Now, you want to party?”

Steve does not want to party. Steve wants to go back to the room. 

“I thought we were getting close,” he says, looking like he wants to punch the wall. Sam heard a few things when Steve was recovering. Like how Steve used to beat punching bags until they fell apart. Like how many men with weapons he took down in an elevator. 

He's different since the helicarrier crash, since he got out of the hospital. Sam hasn't known him long enough to know if it's good different or bad. It's a sort of determination, no longer edged with desperation, but it has something else. It's the determination of a man with a last mission, a man who is willing to lose everything he has to fulfill it. Part of why Sam came along is to hold him back, if he has to. 

“We heard something,” says Sam. “Natasha--you were right. The embassy was just the start. Now that people know what we’re looking for they’ll help us.”

“Or move him. I wish…” Steve’s hands tense on the chair. 

“What?”

“This isn’t the sort of thing I’m good at,” he says. He lets the chair go, dents where his hands were.

After the lights are out, Steve lies down with his back to Sam, and starts talking. “He was injured on the way back to camp, that first mission. I don’t know how injured. He could walk. He was getting through it.” He huffs out a breath. “Maybe the--whatever they did to him, maybe it was already healing him. I don’t know. He never said anything. He kept watch. He even killed some enemy soldiers who sneaked up on his watch. Totally silent, in the dark. I was never that--good.” 

Steve’s voice stays even. In the smallness of the room, his sheer physical presence has been almost too much, but now he's curled on his side, shrunken into himself. Sam wraps a blanket around himself and sits next to Steve on the bed, in the space that he's left at his upper back. He puts his hand on Steve's shoulder.

"We'll get close again," says Sam. He doesn't know if he'd go through this for Riley. Not if Riley tried to kill him. Not after seventy years, even if it doesn't feel that long for Steve. But that's not what matters. It's not whether this Bucky is worth it, it's Steve's feelings that matter. Bucky and Steve were far closer than that, for far longer. In terms of years lived, even, Riley’s been gone for him longer than Bucky ever was for Steve. Maybe in time Steve could come to terms with it, but not when someone is running around, wearing Bucky’s face.

Steve's shoulder relaxes under Sam’s hand, and eventually he rolls onto his back. Sam knows this drill. He's worked with a lot of soldiers who've lost friends, and the best thing to do is mourn them. Even if the Winter Soldier can come back in some way, he won't be the kid that Steve didn't have time to say goodbye to. It’s good if Steve can talk about it.

“They must have seen something in him, to save him,” says Sam. 

“I know.” 

He shifts again, curling toward Sam. His long eyelashes shadow his cheek in the diffuse light from the traffic outside. His eyes aren’t focused on Sam, so Sam lets himself look. It’s not going to be like that, for them. Sam’s a friend, first and always. And Sergeant Barnes--Bucky’s the core Steve thinks he’s wrapped around, whether it’s true or not.

Still, he doesn’t look away when Steve looks up at him, and it’s--something’s in the air between them again.

“I’m not pushing,” says Sam. “Hell, I’m not even offering. But I’m not _not_ offering.”

Steve laughs gently. Sam could fall in love with that laugh, if he let himself. Or it’s too late, and he already does love Steve, his smile, his big body that he still doesn’t seem used to, unless he’s fighting, his unending well of goodness.

“I’m not… _not_ either....” He sits up, puts back on at least a part of what makes him Captain Rogers. “I’m taking a shower and getting some sleep. We should hear more tomorrow.”


	3. Chapter 3

He wakes up fighting, beating his fists against--not restraints this time, but the walls of the coffin. He struggles against lungs that don’t want to fill. 

Soft tissue like lungs recovers slowest from cryo, while muscles respond first, expanding a reluctant rib cage, brittle ligaments. He always tries to fight the panic and he never can, when emerging from immobility, from blankness, into the reality of more enemies to fight. The cryo isn’t restful. He always needs sleep when he comes out of it, but he fights that too. Blankness is better than the dreams.

He slams his hands against the metal walls until his knuckles start to bruise, his metal fist makes dents, and he realizes that this is not the cryo container. He’s never been able to put a dent in that. And the shortness of breath is not from lungs that don’t want to move, but from thin, cold air. So cold. 

Trapped is trapped. Fighting panic is harder than lashing out against this metal prison.

If he’s not about to be freed for another mission, then this is something worse, something he has to fight. It is his job, his priority, to preserve himself, preserve this weapon, and return it to its owners. The thought cuts across everything else, across panic, across memories, a thought not his own. It is deep conditioning burned into his brain, with decades of reinforcement. Because the asset is valuable, and cannot be allowed to destroy itself. To destroy itself is to fail, and it is not allowed to fail.

He stops beating on the coffin. It is dark inside, pinpricks of light showing only at the corners near his feet. It is small enough that he cannot draw his knees up, cannot bend his elbows very far. Panic comes again. He draws thin air into his lungs. Each breath is not enough. If his body was capable of passing out, it would. Instead his vision goes gray and swimming; shadows swarm against the dark.

He flashes to the helicarrier crashing down, a thousand pounds of steel pinning him to the deck, fighting everything, fighting the crushing weight and then Captain America who pulled the beam off of him who he pulled from the river though he still can’t say why and then he went to the safehouse and then the museum and...the cascade of memories is painful and too vivid. Someone is supposed to take these things away, not leave them to accumulate, making him a less than perfect weapon. A weapon doesn’t feel trapped and panicked.

He was taken. He was distracted, chasing these memories, and he was taken. Now he is somewhere that hums, somewhere cold, with thin air. 

The asset is not supposed to show much autonomy, but he needs certain tactical know-how. He operates as independently as possible until the mission is done, and sometimes that means imaginative leaps, deductions, decisions. Though leaving him to make too many decisions has been a problem in the past. These thoughts adhere to flickers of images, conversations overheard, captors and handlers, guards and doctors, discussing the delicate balance that must be maintained for the asset to function correctly.

He returns his thoughts to the present. He is in the cargo hold of a plane, probably, being taken somewhere. By someone who does not know the protocols used to handle the asset. An independent, then, someone to whom no loyalty will be expected.

His panic--his escape attempt--futile though it was, will not have gone unnoticed. He will be greeted with guns and lots of them when the coffin is opened, or he will if his captors have any competence at all. 

He is tired of looking at the blackness. His body is adjusting to the cold, to the thin air, and it wants to sleep, but he cannot let it. Any moment, they might land, and he will need to be ready.

*

The need to sleep grows more desperate as the hours pass, held in the state of waiting. He will be greeted by guns, though a mass of guns pointed at him has never been a problem. He can heal the bullet wounds he can’t outrun.

He is considering giving in and letting himself sleep--probably no one will attack until the plane lands, when the sound of the engine changes, and the clunk of landing gear snapping into place vibrates his cell.

His readiness is for naught, though, because the coffin is moved, loaded onto a train. The air grows hot and thick, as choking as the thin air was before. Now he cannot help but doze. He has sensory memories of trains, underground, maybe. Standing and swaying, while holding onto a strap. Slumped, tipsy, arm around someone. Narrow shoulders, a smile like sun through dark clouds. Wicker seats, a metallic tang in the air.

He wakes when the train stops. More jostling. Voices.

“He dented the box,” someone says in American-accented Russian, in shocked tones. A hushed response.

“Well I’m not opening it,” from the same person. A young man. 

“Check if he’s okay.” Older, more commanding.

“He’s okay. He _dented_ the box.”

“Vitaly Alexandrovich will be angry if he is damaged.” 

More rustling, then the sound of an electronic lock disengaging. Let them do it, he tells himself, willing his body still. Let them open the box that contains their death.

He has his metal hand around the neck of the older one before the younger even has time to raise his weapon. He kicks the rifle out of the boy’s hand while crushing the older man’s larynx. 

The boy drops to his knees. “Please, please, we weren’t going to hurt you. We thought you might want to fight for us.”

People have begged the asset for mercy before, and he has never given it, or even listened for long. Boys like this one learned how tough they were by how long they could last against the Winter Soldier in combat. Give them a gun, a knife, if they could last thirty seconds against the Winter Soldier, unarmed, just woken from cryo, they could live and serve.

This boy wears what may be some kind of paramilitary uniform. He would not last the thirty seconds. He would not last ten.

Still, it’s a strange luxury to contemplate letting him live, seeing who it is that wants the Winter Soldier to fight for them. It is not Hydra, not Pierce, none of his old handlers would capture him so incompetently. He is in a rail yard. Nothing in his field of view moves except the boy, who is crying now, his pleas unintelligible, but tracks rumble, containers thump into place just beyond the temporary walls formed by corrugated metal boxes.

It is in that moment of decision that the armored man enters the room. The distraction gives the boy a moment to jump back. The asset draws himself up straight. He’s not going to attack a threat like this without at least seeing what it can do.

The armored man wears a green cloak and tunic. The features of the mask form a severe, stylized face, with a hard man’s eyes behind the smoky glass. He should know this player; he was in Hydra's database of threats or potential allies, and the details do come after a moment: _Approach Dr. Doom with caution. Rivals Stark and Richards in intelligence. Competent sorcerer. Dictator of a small European country. Severe but consistent sense of honor._

His memory will give him this, but not his own life, the truth behind the events he read about in the museum. 

"They should have brought more men," says Dr. Doom. He steps over the dead man with the crushed larynx, and gestures at the boy, who is staring at the two of them, as if the asset is expected to do something about it. He does nothing. Doom casually backhands the boy, whose head goes flying back. Broken, probably.

“Did you send them?” he asks.

“After a fashion,” says Doom. “They were supplied through back-channels. They thought they were bringing you here to sell you to the Russians in Crimea.” The asset clenches his jaw. “Don’t worry. That was never going to happen. I merely needed you off American soil. These soldiers--pah." 

The asset stands ready for attack, but Doom only walks around the coffin and looks into it. "How did they take you? Did you find the box secure?"

He often does not answer questions. It is a tiny bit of rebellion he allows himself, the only way he can push, to see where the boundaries are. Sometimes he gets away with it because his adversaries/captors/handlers think that he doesn't know enough to answer. He is a weapon, not an intelligence-gathering tool. He only needs to report the deaths he causes and he never fails at those.

"Why should I answer?" he says..

"You have a chance, Winter Soldier," says Doom. "You can be an ally of Doom."

He wishes he had his mask. He's never been good at schooling his face, and now he can feel the shape it twists into.

"American forces are looking for you. Hydra is looking for you. What's left of SHIELD is looking for you. Doom can protect you in Latveria." 

On the border of Hungary, the dossier in his mind supplies. Ruled with an iron fist--quite literally--by Dr. Doom. Yet he feels a thrill of fear when Doom says "America". America means Captain America. The man in the museum exhibit would never leave a friend behind, or let an enemy live. He wears a friend's face, once was him. 

Still, this Doom must know that is not how the Winter Soldier works. He does not make deals or alliances. He is not an independent operator. He is a tool.

"You would make an admirable bodyguard," says Doom, oblivious. "I can protect you from anyone who wants to prosecute you for your crimes." He bites off the last word. Yes, crimes. That is what he has done, lifetimes worth of killing. Pierce said that they were in the service of the future, but they were murders, and Pierce is dead. 

"If I don't?" he asks.

"This is occupied Crimea," says Dr. Doom. "You will find someone who wants your skills here. It's as good a place to disappear as any."

"I don't want to be owned," he answers, without thinking, but it is true. He does not want another handler. He does not want his memories stripped away. He does not want to be imprisoned again, or face the creeping cold of of cryo.

"This will be a mutually beneficial arrangement," says Doom. "We can work out the details on my aircraft."

It is neither a plane nor a helicopter that Doom leads them out to. He wants to get his hands on the controls to see how it moves. It hovers like a helicopter, but without even the rotor blades of the helicarriers. He flexes his hands. Who is he to want things, things other than what he needs to complete a mission?

"You will lead my bodyguards, and take on missions inside and outside of Latveria," says Doom.

"What kinds of missions?"

"Threat elimination," says Doom. "You will be paid, of course. Work for Doom for a year and you will be a rich man."

Money is such an abstract concept to him. Safe houses contain cash. Cash buys things. When he runs out, if he isn't extracted, he can steal more, or he can move on to another cache.

"What do you need to work?" Doom asks.

"Weapons," he answers. "Armor and a mask."

"Someone will come to take your orders," says Doom. “What would you be called?”

He thinks about it. To his face he has only ever been the asset. Others called him _Holodno Soldat_ , Winter Soldier--a description, not a name. His old name, his full name, he cannot claim that now. He does not answer.

"You will like Latveria,” says Doom as they land. 

He is given quarters in Doom's castle. Stone walls, wooden floors, modern appointments, and windows so large they make his skin itch. He feels better once he finds the shutters that close. He paces the floor of the the rooms, trying to keep his footsteps quiet. 

Latveria is not free by any modern measure of the world, but the weight of what freedom he now has is weighing down upon him as if he's still pinned under a ton of iron scaffolding. He strips off his clothes and takes a shower. He smells like the inside of that box.

He catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror: the seam where metal meets flesh, eyes shadowed, hair hanging in his face. He averts his eyes quickly. He doesn't like mirrors.

He hears the steps of guards outside his door as he lies down to sleep. The sound shouldn't be comforting, but it reminds him of the barracks where he slept he was out of cryo but not on a mission. Always guards, shifts, an order to depend on, a certainty that even if he tried to run, he would be turned back. And who would he run to? Doom had reminded him of that. No one would take him in now, unless they wanted to use his skills and Captain America, _Steve_ wouldn't want skills like his. 

To the end of the line, he remembers Captain America saying. He shapes the words with his own mouth. It feels like they've been there before, as though they are threads sewn through his skin, reaching in as deep as the metal parts that go into his shoulder.

No, this is his future, if Pierce is truly dead, and Hydra scattered. He can choose his work, choose employers who will keep him free enough. Until...this body can’t last forever, no matter how deeply ingrained its will to survive.


End file.
